Movie Review: The bird is the word with 'Penguins’

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

Monday

Apr 15, 2019 at 5:04 PMApr 15, 2019 at 5:04 PM

Throughout the 1950s, the folks at Disney made their name – and their money – with animated features, churning out “Cinderella,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Peter Pan,” “Lady and the Tramp,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” During that same period, the company was also making the live-action and often Oscar-winning True-Life Adventures series, with titles including “Nature’s Half Acre,” “Beaver Valley,” The African Lion,” and, as an offshoot entry, in the True-Life Fantasies series, “Perri.”

That last one, a documentary, told in story format, about a forest squirrel, based on the novel by Felix Salten (who also wrote “Bambi”), was the closest in style and content to what Disney has done with their newest entry – “Penguins” – in their contemporary animal-related series, the Disneynature films.

Like “Perri,” “Penguins” focuses on one main character – a cute little “Adélie penguin named Steve who, when we first meet him, is 5 years old, weighs about 15 pounds, and stands at 2 feet tall. It’s springtime in Antarctica, and there’s Steve, all alone in a long tracking shot, walking and walking ... and slipping and sliding on the ice, and sometimes just barely managing not to fall. Steve is a klutz, and a young penguin who’s just about to join adult society, as 500,000 Adélie penguins are returning to the colony where they were born, but left during the winter months for better feeding grounds.

As in those ’50s films, this one is narrated, done here in fine fashion by Ed Helms, who, following a tight, informative, and entertaining script, explains what’s going on – who is a friend, who is a foe, now the mating ritual works. But Helms also provides the voice and inner thoughts of what Steve might be saying if we could hear and read his thoughts.

This is a story of survival, with looks at the gentle side of things, such as Steve and 250,000 other males preparing nests made from stones they collect so that when the 250,000 females return to the colony in a “second wave,” their eggs will be protected from the icy ground.

But there’s also a different sort of survival being shown here – the life or death kind, with predators, ranging from hungry Orcas (killer whales) to predatory Skuas (nasty birds), lurking on the sidelines and sometimes leading full-out assaults on our little pals.

Yet the filmmakers don’t devote a lot of time to those perilous situations, keeping them more in the background. Instead, the film sticks more with the light side of things, including a “first love” sequence between Steve and Adeline, who catches his eye. “I wonder if she thinks I’m attractive,” thinks Helms, followed by, “She smells great!”

Soon there are two eggs, and eventually two chicks, and in the film’s brief 76-minute running time, many stories involving them including how the family makes it through ferocious winds and a blizzard, some funny sequences of dad unable to maintain control of feeding them and, late in the film, a return of some of those predators and the introduction of a switch in mood to some truly frightening and perilous events. All that will be revealed here is that, in the hands of Disney, you won’t have to cover your eyes or the eyes of your kids, though there are a couple of “you-can-hear-a-pin-drop” moments.

The footage, culled from thousands of hours of film shot over a period of two and a half years, is amazing, with viewers able to get extremely close to these animals. The only misstep – one that’s been done in previous Disney entries – is the inclusion of generic pop songs that purportedly help to tell the story, but only get in the way. By the end, the seasons have again changed and the cycle of life continues. And if you sit through the credits, you get treated to how the filmmakers got that amazing footage.